Woman rappers like Cardi B, Noname shouldn’t be labeled the “female version of (blank)”

Women are increasingly breaking into the hip-hop/rap genre, paving the way for breakout artists like Cardi B, Noname and Rapsody.

But when their art is released, there’s always some kind of evaluation that relates to their male rapper counterparts. Woman artists can release an album that people love, but aren’t given the credit they deserve by being dubbed the “female version of (insert name of male artist).”

Cardi B is the first woman in the genre, and the first of Dominican descent, to have a No. 1 song on the Billboard 100 as a solo artist in 19 years. This song is “Bodak Yellow.”

But, like clockwork, her success is accompanied with criticism. Some discredit her by arguing that “Bodak Yellow” is a copy of Kodak Black’s “No Flockin,” even though she stated that she sampled the beat with her own spin on it.

“Laila’s Wisdom” rapper Rapsody faced a similar situation. This album was one of the year’s best lyrical rap albums, and referred to as the female version of Kendrick Lamar’s “To Pimp a Butterfly.” Noname has been considered the “girl version of Chance the Rapper” and others like SZA have been compared to PARTYNEXTDOOR.

These women pour their heart into the creation of their projects. Reducing them to just male versions of other artists discredits their work, saying, in a way, that they lack originality.

It’s as though these people don’t want to give the artists the credit they deserve, and instead give these male artists more notoriety than the original artist mentioned. People are going go out of their way to listen to an album, and thank another artist for somehow giving them the idea to create the project, only because they released it earlier.

Many of these artists are bringing new perspectives to their music. They are curating new ways for the next artists to come into the game, and to not acknowledge what they’ve done is blasphemous.

Michael Espinosa is a junior communication and rhetorical studies major. Her column appears biweekly in Pulp. You can email him at maesp100@syr.edu.